The Internet is enabling businesses to develop new ways to facilitate efficient and automated interactions between their own internal line of business, productivity and knowledge management applications, the applications used by their customers and trading partners, and services provided by their commercial and corporate providers. The challenges associated with enabling such efficient and automated interactions between applications across business boundaries in a cost effective manner are similar to those associated with enabling them within an enterprise or departmental boundary. Building business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce systems presents many challenges to the system architect. Often, each company involved stores their data and documents in formats that are different from the formats used by the other participating companies. These companies need a way to integrate what tend to be vastly different systems. In addition, Internet security issues are involved in business to business data interchange. Thus, several challenges are faced by businesses, governments, and other entities wishing to interact via electronic documents and other forms of electronic commerce.
The challenges to interaction across business boundaries include lack of a sufficiently flexible and rich universal language to specify, package, publish, and exchange both structured and unstructured information across application or business boundaries, lack of a flexible and rich universal language to specify, package, publish, and execute transformation rules to convert information from one format to the other as application and business boundaries are crossed, and lack of middleware-neutral application level communication protocols to enable automated interactions across application or business boundaries. The eXtensible Markup Language (XML), and XML-based schema languages enable businesses and other users to describe and exchange structured information between collaborating applications or business partners in a platform and middleware neutral manner.
Domain specific standards bodies and industry initiatives have started to adopt XML and XML-based schema languages to specify both their vocabularies and content models. These schemas are becoming widely published and implemented to facilitate communication between both applications and businesses. Wide support of XML has also resulted in independent solution providers developing solutions that enable the exchange of XML-based information with other external third party or custom developed applications. Several solution or middleware/platform specific approaches have been taken to address the lack of middleware-neutral application level communication protocols.
However, no single proprietary solution or middleware platform meets all the needs of a complex deployment environment. In addition, the cost and complexity of integrating together ERP systems, inventory management systems, or sales tracking systems within a single organization strains the capabilities of most large and small companies alike. In the near future, electronic commerce is going to require massive amounts of application integration across multiple organizations, as trading partners turn to the Internet to automate supply chains, forecasting systems, and government services, and new types of business interchanges.
Although XML provides a standardized format for document definition, conventional development tools require system developers to create code for mapping individual source document schemas with target schemas in order to facilitate the interchange of information between business organizations or entities. In a typical example, two companies may create schemas for their documents in XML. Where these companies want to exchange information via internal documents, an XML schema is created for documents at each company, and a system developer generates code for mapping information transfer between the source and target document schemas. Such mapping code may be developed in a language such as eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL). A developer may thus create an XSL style sheet representation of a mapping between source and target schemas.
An XSL style sheet is a form of mapping which includes a template of the desired target structure, and identifies data in the source document to insert into this template. This model for merging data and templates is referred to as the template-driven model and works well on regular and repetitive data. XSL also provides capabilities for handling highly irregular and recursive data such as is typical in documents. Template fragments are defined, and the XSL processor combines the results of these fragments into a final result tree based on the shape of the source data. Each template fragment declares the type and context of source nodes it is appropriate for, allowing the XSL processor to match source nodes with template fragments. This model is known as the data-driven model since the shape of the data drives the shape of the final output. An XSL transformation process is thus independent of any particular output grammar and can be used for translating XML data from one schema (source) to another (target).
Heretofore, system developers have provided code defining the interrelationships between XML business documents, based on the desired information to be exchanged via electronic commerce applications. However, for each source and target document set, code must be written mapping the relationships therebetween. Whether the code representing such a mapping is written in XSL or another language, writing this code is difficult and typically beyond the capabilities of ordinary business personnel. Conventional tools require a user to program document schema mappings using specialized, often proprietary, programming languages. The complexity of such programming languages and the learning curve associated therewith has heretofore discouraged average business personnel from attempting to create document mappings without the aid of experienced programmers. Improved tools are thus desirable to enable business personnel to define document mappings for business to business applications, as well as to generate mapping code, which do not require extensive knowledge of software programming.